North Korea, the dead land

Hyok Kang, who escaped from his oppressive homeland in 1998, provides a unique
and harrowing insight into Kim Jong-il's dictatorship, which can build
nuclear weapons - but not feed its people

North Korean leader Kim Jong-il (L) visits the Pyongyang Grand Theater, which was renovated, in this undated picture released by the North's official news agency KCNA early April 5, 2009Photo: REUTERS/KCNA

I was nine when I saw my first execution. The man had been condemned to death for stealing copper wire to sell in China, crossing the border under the cover of darkness. He was dragged to the foot of the mountain near a railway track. A train that happened to pass stopped to let passengers watch the scene.

Executions were a frequent occurrence in our small city, but the inhabitants never tired of them. Primary and secondary school pupils skipped classes to join the audience, which always consisted of hundreds, even thousands, of people. Posters went up in the city several days before. When the time came, the condemned man was displayed in the streets before being led to the place of execution, where he was made to sit on the ground, head bowed, so everyone could get a good look at him. He was dressed in a garment designed by army scientists for public executions, a greyish one-piece suit made of very thick, fleece-lined cotton. That way, when the bullets are fired, the blood doesn't spurt out but is absorbed by this fabric, which turns red. The body is thrown on a cart and then abandoned in the mountains for the dogs to eat.

I was born on April 20 1986 in a village not far from Onsong, a city of 300,000 inhabitants in the north-east of the People's Democratic Republic of Korea, close to the Chinese border and Siberia. The city is divided into ku (districts) and ban (classifications) of 20 families. My parents lived in ban number three, in a semi-rural zone. The house was like dozens of others built on the same model and lined up in rows. There was a door, a single window, and a roof of curved orange tiles. The walls were white, but they had been painted blue to a height that I must have passed about the age of eight or nine. Each time the district officials came to check the hygiene of the houses, as they regularly did, they ordered us to change the colour of this lower part: to green, now blue, now light brown, but all the houses in our ban had to be the same colour; perhaps because dwellings, like everything else in North Korea, are the property of the people. That means that nothing belongs to anyone.

Inside were two rooms separated by a sliding door. The floors were covered with pale brown varnished floor-paper, and in the main room hung portraits of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. That was compulsory. You had to call the father: "Dear respected comrade head of state Great Leader Kim Il-sung", or, more simply, "Comrade Great Leader". For his son, the formula was "Dear Leader Kim Jong-il", until Kim Il-sung's death in 1994; then we had to call him "Great Leader Kim Jong-il".

Our district stood at the foot of some mountains, which were riddled with coal mines. Everyone lived off the mines. The good side was that you didn't die of cold in winter, as you might have done elsewhere, because our fuel supplies were always guaranteed. My father was a miner. It was a dangerous place: there were hundreds of galleries underground, and collapses were frequent because the wooden struts propping them up were often stolen by people who sold them for food. The mine was plunged into mourning around once a month.

My grandparents' house, five rows away, was at least three times as big. The land was at least ten times as big as everyone else's, and they grew cucumbers, melons, cabbages, aubergines, courgettes, maize, beans, turnips.

The reason the authorities treated my grandparents so benevolently was simple. Previously they had lived in Japan, like many Koreans. When the Korean peninsula was a Japanese colony between 1910 and 1945, hundreds of thousands of Koreans had been deported to Japan as forced labourers. Later, thousands more Koreans, fleeing the Korean War, joined them. Then, in the late 1950s, following the example of tens of thousands of other pro-Communist Koreans, my family chose to return, and handed their goods over to the regime. Life was hard and everyone expressed their regrets about leaving Japan almost immediately. From a very young age, my father heard his parents complaining about the wretched conditions. "When we lived so well in Japan..." grandfather would say.

To thank "patriotic families" like ours Kim Il-Sung had, none the less granted them certain privileges. For my grandparents that came in the form of a fine house. The Great Leader also sent gifts from time to time: bottles of taepyeung sul, a very expensive rice spirit that most people can't afford, or sweets.

In our house, as in all the others, there was a loudspeaker that delivered broadcasts from the capital, Pyongyang. They told you the news, always devoted to the Dear Leader Kim Jong-il, alternated with songs composed in his honour or to the glory of his father. We also had a radio that received these broadcasts, which was fixed by the authorities to that single station. A radio imported from abroad had to be taken to a security office where it was switched to the official station so that we wouldn't hear any other programmes.

We were fortunate as we also had a TV. As we were close to the Chinese border, we were able to pick up the Beijing channels. That was forbidden, so we did it at night, with the curtains drawn. Chinese television gave us an incredible view of the world. There were cars everywhere, rich people who ate all the time, lovely homes piled with household appliances. That said, we were suspicious of these pictures, because North Korean television also produced pseudo-documentaries that showed us as prosperous and happy, which we certainly weren't.

Motorised vehicles were rare. The richest travelled by bicycle, but most people went on foot. People often walk for 40 kilometres without grumbling. And they had many reasons for travelling, chief among them being the black market. You bought merchandise that was cheaper in one place to sell at a higher price elsewhere.

In North Korea, nursery school is followed by four years of primary and six years of secondary school. After that, everyone joins the army for 13 years. You leave at the age of 30, and it's only then that you can start thinking about girls and marriage.

In each classroom there hung a photograph of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il, side by side. These pictures were very large, and placed just above the blackboard so that we could always see them, which gave us the impression that the rulers' eyes were on us at all times. Our uniforms were navy blue and cut in a military style. We put our fountain pens in our breast pockets, from which they had to show slightly.

School was from Monday to Saturday afternoon. After class, every day, we had to do agricultural work for two or three hours. On Sunday we laboured all day, with a picnic at lunchtime. There were hardly any adults around when we were working, and at times I got the impression that we children did most of the work in the fields.

As we hoed, sowed or harvested, we were subjected to a continuous flood of revolutionary songs, always very cheerful, broadcast by a propaganda lorry equipped with enormous loudspeakers. Although there are very few vehicles in Onsong, there were at least three propaganda lorries, which travelled the city and the surrounding villages. On top of that, in every district pylons fitted with loudspeakers broadcast party orders and martial music that woke us every morning. On holidays, the loudspeakers in the village broadcast uninterruptedly throughout the day.

Food was scarce, even before the famine. Every two weeks, the national system of food distribution allowed us a food ration made up of crushed maize and rice. There were often delays in supply. They had begun as early as 1985. But shortly before the death of Kim Il-Sung, in 1994, the system began to break down.

The landscape changed a lot as the famine increased from 1995. There was no more rice, no more potatoes, even in small quantities. We moved on to noodles made of maize flour, boiled them up in lots of water and served them in soup. Later, our village started eating weeds like wormwood and dandelion, which were boiled up into a form of soup. It was so bitter that we could barely keep it down. As the soup wasn't very nourishing, we ate it in large quantities and ended up with hugely distended stomachs.

At school, as time passed, there were fewer and fewer of us at our desks. The teachers sat shapelessly in their chairs, cane in hand, while we repeated by heart lessons we had already learned about the childhoods of Kim Il-sung and Kim Jong-il. Yet work in the fields was still compulsory despite the fact that the remaining pupils and teachers were extremely weak. We actually went there not to work, but to glean anything we could find to keep from starving to death.

In the end, just before I escaped to China with my family in 1998, there were only eight or nine of us in class. The rest were too weak even to walk.

Party cadres said that floods had caused the famine, wreaking havoc through the whole country. In Onsong, this wasn't the case, but I thought that elsewhere nature must have been less kind. Since it was practically impossible to travel across the country, no one could verify this.

The authorities also told us that the United States and South Korea bore some responsibility for the shortages, because it was they who had started the Korean War. It was only many years later, once I had reached South Korea, that I discovered to my great confusion that the Korean War had been started not by the "Southern puppets" but by Kim Il-sung himself.

This Is Paradise!: My North Korean Childhood by Hyok Kang, is available from Telegraph Books from £7.99 + 99p P&P. To order, call 0844 871 1516 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk